Panasonic Japan issued the following statement:

Notice about LUMIX GH6
Thank you for your continued patronage of Panasonic products.
Regarding the mirrorless single-lens camera “LUMIX GH6” that was developed and announced on May 26, 2021 We were aiming for commercialization within 2021, but it is expected to be delayed. Currently, we are aiming for commercialization in early 2022. We apologize for any inconvenience caused to customers who are waiting for this product. Deeply apologize. December 16, 2021 Panasonic Corporation

Not really a surprise…the worldwide chip shortage will be a plague at least til 2023!

Nikon announced the new 28-75mm f/2.8 lens (preorder here at BHphoto). And they also teased the future launch of a new 800mm f/6.3 PF lens:

THE NIKKOR Z 28-75mm f/2.8 IS THE AFFORDABLE GATEWAY TO FAST APERTURE AND FULL FRAME FIDELITY

Nikon Also Announces Development of the NIKKOR Z 800mm f/6.3 VR S Super Telephoto Prime Lens

MELVILLE, NY (December 13, 2021) – Today, Nikon Inc. announced the NIKKOR Z 28-75mm f/2.8, the latest lens to expand the impressive NIKKOR Z portfolio, putting the potential for boundless creativity and maximum versatility into the hands of enthusiasts. The NIKKOR Z 28-75mm f/2.8 is an affordable and appealing choice for those ready to step up to a full-frame medium zoom lens with the benefits of a constant f/2.8 aperture including gorgeous, softly blurred backgrounds and excellent low light capability.

“Since the beginning of this year, we have announced numerous NIKKOR Z lenses for all levels of creators, which have been commended for their unrivaled quality and edge-to-edge sharpness,” said Jay Vannatter, Executive Vice President, Nikon Inc. “Now we are continuing this winning streak by adding an extremely enticing option for enthusiasts in the rapidly growing full-frame market.”

The new NIKKOR Z 28-75mm f/2.8 is an attractive value for all types of photographers and creators, providing a lightweight lens with a versatile focal range and an f/2.8 constant aperture, all for an affordable price. Capable of everything from impressive portraits with a soft background blur to extremely detailed landscape photos, striking low-light ambience or a small-footprint video production, the 28-75mm f/2.8 covers it all. The fixed aperture of f/2.8 enables a pleasing depth of field with natural bokeh to emphasize the focus on the subject. The lightweight lens weighs only 1.2lbs (565g), making it incredibly easy to pack, carry casually or wield for an all-day event. When paired with a Nikon Z 5, the new 28-75mm f/2.8 creates a compelling combination as a carry-anywhere, cost-effective full-frame kit, or paired with the Z 6II to step up content creation to the next level.

The NIKKOR Z 28-75mm f/2.8 offers many of the benefits of its highly acclaimed sibling, the NIKKOR Z 24-70mm f/2.8 S. While both lenses are extremely versatile options and serve as staples in every photographer’s bag, the 28-75mm f/2.8 is approximately 30% lighter with a slimmer profile. The lens features a control ring for maximum customization, and excels in video creation due to minimal focus breathing and near-silent operation. The new 28-75mm f/2.8 also features a minimum focusing distance of only 0.19m (at 28mm), making it a great option for cuisine, table-scapes and intricate fashion.

Primary features of the NIKKOR Z 28-75mm f/2.8:

• The NIKKOR Z 28-75mm f/2.8 delivers incredible sharpness and a bright f/2.8 aperture, affording the ability to shoot in low light or produce images with a natural and pleasing bokeh.
• The lens weighs only 1.2 lbs oz (565g), which is 8.4 oz lighter than the NIKKOR Z 24-70mm f/2.8 S. In addition to its portability, the lens is well-suited for gimbal use for content creation and video productions.
• The minimum focus distance of 0.62ft (0.19m) allows users to capture intricate details.
• By employing a stepping motor (STM) with superior response, the lens quickly focuses on moving subjects during still-shooting or video recording. The extremely quiet STM greatly reduces the level of lens drive and operational sounds during focusing and video recording.
• With the control ring, users can focus manually or change ISO sensitivity, aperture and exposure compensation in stills and video. The smooth rotation enables precise focus control. The knurling employed improves operation.
• The lens is sealed to prevent dust and water droplets from entry, enabling use in everyday circumstances without worry.* It also features effective antifouling coating for easy cleaning.

Development of the NIKKOR Z 800mm f/6.3 VR S

Nikon is pleased to announce the development of the NIKKOR Z 800mm f/6.3 VR S, a super-telephoto prime lens for full-frame (Nikon FX-format) Nikon Z mirrorless cameras.

The NIKKOR Z 800mm f/6.3 VR S is an S-Line lens, delivering powerful rendering with outstanding resolution while thoroughly reducing color bleeding. By adopting a PF (Phase Fresnel) lens that enables a compact and lightweight body, it is highly portable despite being a super-telephoto lens. With its high rendering performance and superb mobility, this lens will be an excellent choice for many types of photographers ranging from advanced amateurs to professionals.

DPReview TV:

Who makes the best 24mm and 35mm lenses for L-mount? We did a side-by-side comparison between the Panasonic 24mm F1.8 and Sigma 24mm F2, as well as the Panasonic 35mm F1.8 and Sigma 35mm F2. It turns out there are some big differences!

Nikkei reports about Canon’s plan to mass produce their new SPAD sensor capable of color photography in the dark. Here is the Google translated summary from Digicameinfo:

• Canon has developed an image sensor that enables high-quality color photography even in the dark. The CMOS sensor used in digital cameras can recognize up to about one-tenth the brightness of light that can be detected, and can take clear pictures even in situations where nothing can be seen with the naked eye. It will be mass-produced from 2022. It may lead to improved image recognition performance in a wide range of industrial applications such as autonomous driving and crime prevention / monitoring.
• We have developed a light receiving element called a SPAD (single photon avalanche diode) image sensor. You can shoot clear color images even in total darkness, which was difficult with the CMOS sensor. The number of pixels of the sensor that holds the key to the sharpness of the image is 3.2 million pixels, which is more than three times that of the conventional SPAD, which is the highest in the world.
• The SPAD sensor also has the feature of measuring the distance to the object from the time it takes for the reflected light from the object to return, and capturing the space in three dimensions. Therefore, it is expected to be used in a wide range of fields such as the high-performance sensor “LiDAR” that is indispensable for autonomous driving and augmented reality (AR).

That’s supercool! Here is their official press text:

Micro-sized cameras have great potential to spot problems in the human body and enable sensing for super-small robots, but past approaches captured fuzzy, distorted images with limited fields of view.

Now, researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington have overcome these obstacles with an ultracompact camera the size of a coarse grain of salt. The new system can produce crisp, full-color images on par with a conventional compound camera lens 500,000 times larger in volume, the researchers reported in a paper published Nov. 29 in Nature Communications.

Enabled by a joint design of the camera’s hardware and computational processing, the system could enable minimally invasive endoscopy with medical robots to diagnose and treat diseases, and improve imaging for other robots with size and weight constraints. Arrays of thousands of such cameras could be used for full-scene sensing, turning surfaces into cameras.

While a traditional camera uses a series of curved glass or plastic lenses to bend light rays into focus, the new optical system relies on a technology called a metasurface, which can be produced much like a computer chip. Just half a millimeter wide, the metasurface is studded with 1.6 million cylindrical posts, each roughly the size of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Each post has a unique geometry, and functions like an optical antenna. Varying the design of each post is necessary to correctly shape the entire optical wavefront. With the help of machine learning-based algorithms, the posts’ interactions with light combine to produce the highest-quality images and widest field of view for a full-color metasurface camera developed to date.

A key innovation in the camera’s creation was the integrated design of the optical surface and the signal processing algorithms that produce the image. This boosted the camera’s performance in natural light conditions, in contrast to previous metasurface cameras that required the pure laser light of a laboratory or other ideal conditions to produce high-quality images, said Felix Heide, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton.

The researchers compared images produced with their system to the results of previous metasurface cameras, as well as images captured by a conventional compound optic that uses a series of six refractive lenses. Aside from a bit of blurring at the edges of the frame, the nano-sized camera’s images were comparable to those of the traditional lens setup, which is more than 500,000 times larger in volume.

Other ultracompact metasurface lenses have suffered from major image distortions, small fields of view, and limited ability to capture the full spectrum of visible light — referred to as RGB imaging because it combines red, green and blue to produce different hues.

“It’s been a challenge to design and configure these little nano-structures to do what you want,” said Ethan Tseng, a computer science Ph.D. student at Princeton who co-led the study. “For this specific task of capturing large field of view RGB images, it was previously unclear how to co-design the millions of nano-structures together with post-processing algorithms.”

Co-lead author Shane Colburn tackled this challenge by creating a computational simulator to automate testing of different nano-antenna configurations. Because of the number of antennas and the complexity of their interactions with light, this type of simulation can use “massive amounts of memory and time,” said Colburn. He developed a model to efficiently approximate the metasurfaces’ image production capabilities with sufficient accuracy.

Colburn conducted the work as a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (UW ECE), where he is now an affiliate assistant professor. He also directs system design at Tunoptix, a Seattle-based company that is commercializing metasurface imaging technologies. Tunoptix was cofounded by Colburn’s graduate adviser Arka Majumdar, an associate professor at the University of Washington in the ECE and physics departments and a coauthor of the study.

Coauthor James Whitehead, a Ph.D. student at UW ECE, fabricated the metasurfaces, which are based on silicon nitride, a glass-like material that is compatible with standard semiconductor manufacturing methods used for computer chips — meaning that a given metasurface design could be easily mass-produced at lower cost than the lenses in conventional cameras.

“Although the approach to optical design is not new, this is the first system that uses a surface optical technology in the front end and neural-based processing in the back,” said Joseph Mait, a consultant at Mait-Optik and a former senior researcher and chief scientist at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

“The significance of the published work is completing the Herculean task to jointly design the size, shape and location of the metasurface’s million features and the parameters of the post-detection processing to achieve the desired imaging performance,” added Mait, who was not involved in the study.

Heide and his colleagues are now working to add more computational abilities to the camera itself. Beyond optimizing image quality, they would like to add capabilities for object detection and other sensing modalities relevant for medicine and robotics.

Heide also envisions using ultracompact imagers to create “surfaces as sensors.” “We could turn individual surfaces into cameras that have ultra-high resolution, so you wouldn’t need three cameras on the back of your phone anymore, but the whole back of your phone would become one giant camera. We can think of completely different ways to build devices in the future,” he said.

Besides Tseng, Colburn, Whitehead, Majumdar and Heide, the study’s authors include Luocheng Huang, a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington; and Seung-Hwan Baek, a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton.

The work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, the UW Reality Lab, Facebook, Google, Futurewei Technologies, and Amazon.